Sunday, 7 October 2012

Why Jeremy Hunt scares the life out of me.

I write this with a
feeling of utter disbelief that I should feel the need to do so. In the
UK, in the year 2012, we are apparently to be dragged back into a fight most of
us thought long won - the battle for the rights of women to make our own moral choices.

A few days ago, new
Women's Minister Maria Miller stated that the time limit on abortion should be
lowered; you can read about that here.
That's right; we have a Minister for Women who wants to limit the
reproductive rights of women - her actions, I am delighted to say, resulted in
the hashtag #MariaMillerDoesNotSpeakForMe trending on Twitter. However,
Cameron's appointment of an anti-women Women's Minister has been somewhat
eclipsed - a remarkable feat in itself - by his appointment of Jeremy Hunt as
Health Secretary.

Jeremy Hunt. You
know, Rupert Murdoch's BFF. The one with the creative tax returns. Thinks serious diseases can be treated with
drops of magic water. No education in science or in medicine – you know
the one I mean.

And Hunt's wasted no time
getting scary; today we learned that based on no evidence whatsoever and
against the consensus of the medical profession, he wants to lower the time
limit for abortion in the UK to twelve weeks. Why? Well according
to this Guardian article,
it's because "[t]here's an incredibly
difficult question about the moment we should deem life to start. I'm not
someone who thinks that abortion should be made illegal. Everyone looks at the
evidence and comes to a view about when that moment is and my own view is that
12 weeks is the right point for it."

Let's
just be clear about something here; this man, who has no medical training at
all and quite openly has no value for evidence-based practice, not only
believes his subjective opinion should outweigh the consensus of the scientific
community in matters of policy BUT DOES NOT EVEN POSSESS THE WIT TO UNDERSTAND
WHY HE SHOULDN'T ADMIT TO BELIEVING THAT. And
this man is responsible for our healthcare.

This is terrifying.

I've blogged before about
the bizarre notion that women's bodies should be considered somehow public or
even government property; the short version is thatyoudon't have the right to stop me
making a certain decision about my life just because it's not the same decision
you believeyouwould make in my place. The time limit on abortion IS a moral grey
area, as Hunt himself admits and as I'm happy to concede; in truth I’m somewhat ambivalent about later-term abortions because there’s
so much that must be taken into account. But
the salient point here is that my opinion on whether other people should have abortions later in pregnancy doesn’t
matter; even if I HAD a strong conviction on the subject, it would not be my place to inflict my personal opinion
on others and put women's lives at risk by making it illegal to disagree with me. Neither, I contend, is it
Jeremy Hunt’s.

He’s attempting to render
a grey area black-and-white by making it illegal to disagree with his own
entirely arbitrary opinion, and he doesn’t seem even to realize why that’s at
once logically ludicrous, morally revolting AND terrifying. I’m sick of saying that pro-choice doesn’t
mean pro-abortion; being pro-choice simply means being willing to let people
make these difficult moral decisions for themselves, not treating grown women
as if they’re goddamn children.

Abortion itself is almost
a secondary issue here (keep your eye on it, though, because having Hunt
publicly shoot for twelve weeks would be a great way to make the people aiming
at twenty weeks sound reasonable - exactly analogous to the point I was making
in the Akin article linked above); the scary thing about this, really, is that
Hunt is now responsible for decisions on medical matters for the entire country... and it
already horrifyingly clear that he has no value for logic or for evidence-based
reasoning.

It’s been said many times
in recent years that we now live in a world in which all opinions are
considered inherently valid on their own merits. This has led, among much else, to homeopathy
being funded by our already-stretched NHS, to religious leaders being consulted
on matters of public policy, and to people with no scientific education
whatever being convinced that their uninformed belief in creationism puts them
on an equal platform in debate to real scientists and scholars. To quote Asimov, too many of us now labour
under the foolish and dangerous misapprehension that “my ignorance is just as
good as your knowledge”.

The appointment of someone
like Hunt to such a position as that he now holds is a terrible comment on the
anti-intellectual and politically cowardly illogic that pervades our society
and shows itself in every parent who elects not to vaccinate, every believer who
contends that their fatuous notions
should govern the lives of others, and every vicious charlatan who takes people’s
money in exchange for “psychic” readings, cleansing of auras or quack
medicines.

If people want to run their
own lives according to idiotic ideas I can’t stop them, but Hunt and others
like him can fuck right off if they think for a moment that they’re going to abuse their power to
inflict such rubbish on the rest of us.

4 comments:

Maybe it's all in preparation of Sharia law taking over in general in the foreseeable future, seeing how the UK is slowly but surely turning into an Islamic state (along with the rest of Europe). You know, get people slowly used to more and more cuts of their birthrights until none are left which do not conform with the "Prophet"'s will...

Geezus... what a waste of an Enlightenment. D'ya think that maybe, perhaps, possibly Hunt, Miller, Cameron and their ilk should listen to what bona fide scientists have to say about such matters? Like... Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan?

http://2think.org/abortion.shtml

Their conclusions on page 4 are based upon verified medical evidence rather than unproven religious dogma.

How do people like him get into the positions they get into? Similar examples abound: religious fundamentalists on the US "Science Committee" (sure the term Orwellian is tossed around a lot, but really!), or here in Canada our science minister is a chiropractor who would not say whether he accepted evolution (ie, he's a creationist).

I really enjoy your writing style/attitude; "I'm not sure why that is hard to understand" "fuck right off" etc. Very British.